David McConnell

The Silver Hearted

The Silver Hearted

By David McConnell; paperback, 230 pages; Alyson Books, list price: $14.95

One has to think a long way back to find a seafaring novel as exotic and freewheeling as David McConnell's strange and wonderful second novel — which ought to count as a debut since The Firebrat, his first, was published seven years ago by a press so small it is now out of business. As The Silver Hearted opens, our unnamed narrator heads off for Brazil's Lost City of Z with $36,000 crammed into 24 blue boxes. To protect this loot, our mysterious narrator hires a teenage soldier, who steers them in and out of trouble as the country around them succumbs to all out war.

Nautical novels are often closet histories of a place, but not this one. The tribes McConnell describes are not Amazonian, nor are they anything else. Like Peter Cameron's equally alluring Andorra, the book is deliberately abstract, except when it comes to the budding attraction between men (and there are only men in this book) on the boats. "Now I like you," one man tells the narrator, after he checks him for bruises after a bar fight, "You're very considerate when you maim a guy for life." A gay heart of darkness mixed with a pirate story? McConnell shows that when you write like a dream, anything is possible.

A revolution-ravaged city. A shipment of gold. Warring factions. Lawlessness. Sounds like the setting for a Conrad tale. In his new novel, author McConnell visits Conradian territory and gives it a lyrical postmodern spin, in a story of intrigue that, like Conrad, explores the role of an observer of human adventures and failures who is also something of a failed adventurer himself.

The setting for "The Silver Hearted" is a coastal city -- unnamed -- that could be tropical, Middle Eastern or subequatorial but also evokes such hot zones as Bosnia. The protagonist -- also unnamed -- is trying to leave the city amid its violent political insurrection, with a horde of silver coins he is transporting for a company. The effect gives the reader a sense of dislocation, of being in a war zone, of trying to live in the uncertain seconds of upheaval.
McConnell has written a thriller that also, like a Conrad novel, explores conflicting motivations and a world without heroism, only survival.

[H]is voice is eerily compelling . . . By turns jaded and highly alert, he describes his situation in clipped sentences that maintain suspense despite a complicated plot . . .

I can think of few writers who could so convincingly imagine, evoke, and people a distant world. At its best, The Silver Hearted attains a kind of hypnotic transcendence . . .

By Gaelan Lee Benway


THIS IS a strange and marvelous bird of a novel. On its surface, The Silver Hearted is an adventure story that convincingly channels the classics of that genre. A layer below the surface ripples a sharp critique of colonial and post-colonial themes that go further than Conrad or Forster could have done. Deeper still, there lurks a dark and convincing novel of ideas—big ideas like truth and consciousness. Those big ideas and their delivery are McConnell’s province alone. With so much at stake, McConnell takes a staggering risk with his unnamed and gloriously unreliable narrator, but the risk pays off brilliantly, as the reader’s attention is so occupied with getting a bead on the protagonist’s character and motivation that the big ideas insinuate themselves almost effortlessly. The experience of reading The Silver Hearted is, one imagines, a lot like the narrator’s experience of its action—challenging, scary, uproarious, and redemptive.

In a prologue of sorts, the protagonist plummets from wealth to poverty upon the death of his parents. While he insists that his suddenly diminished circumstances are welcome and appears to embrace his poverty, the action of the novel turns on his efforts to preserve a fortune. That fortune is the single inescapable fact of The Silver Hearted. As a party to a questionably legitimate investment group, the protagonist turns up in a secondary city of a turbulent non-Western country in possession of 24 boxes of silver coin and charged with the task of returning the chests to the city of Z, where he was hired. Within pages, he has escaped a violent uprising with his chests intact and blood on his hands. There follows a premonitory river journey between the hinterland and the capital, which cannot help but remind us of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

By the time the riverboat Myrrha reaches the capital, McConnell has arrayed all the elements he needs for the protagonist’s second labor, that of protecting his booty from a corrupt and ineffective government, a venal military, and a narrow array of predatory international economic agencies (not to mention the evidently parastatal corporate concern he represents). This capital, called “A” until the narrator arrives there with his treasure, could be almost anywhere along the periphery of the global system.
The plot of The Silver Hearted is related in spare, staccato bursts of surpassing loveliness or clinical grimness. An embattled chateau is “alarmed-looking,” while nearly abandoned apartment blocks have a “drained-ocean dreaminess.” Pieces of deck floating in the water look “as if someone sloppy had tried to lay a parquet on the sea.” In contrast to these fanciful renderings of place, there is an aggressive naturalism to the dialogue, and McConnell’s ear for the paralanguage of the different characters is evident early on. In a pivotal early scene, the protagonist and the riverboat captain who ferries him and his silver out of the city of B speak in the halting phrases of the morally conflicted as they try to decide whether to leave behind the narrator’s cohorts and save themselves.

McConnell relates the protagonist’s brief foray into the culture of the elite Mandarins with much more direct language, but arguably more clandestine purpose, than Forster in A Passage to India. (The Mandarins are so called not for their ethnicity or their occupational status but for their byzantine religion and cloistered ethnocentrism.) In the company of callow but connected journalist Carter van Loon, the narrator travels into the jungle to witness the ritual sacrifice of a red bird. In a departure from iconic colonial tales, the purpose (if not the ideological reason) for the hunt is clear even to outsiders, and when the event turns deadly, no one seems surprised.

In the first acts of the book, cities and countries are named only with initials. This deliberate coyness about locations—“the famous city of Z” or “the whip-lashed palms of B”—operates in contrast to the narrator’s apparently ruthless self-awareness and unblinking self-disclosure. The same technique serves to befuddle the reader as to the geographic location of the story (the riverboat that carried the protagonist is reported to have come from Sudan, while both “Mandarins” and “Karak Indians” are named as indigenous). Although he never gives himself a name, the narrator is scrupulous about naming most of his “red shirts” and gives the reader detailed glimpses into their doomed minds before dispatching them. As the story progresses, the narrator’s veracity is increasingly “out of true,” a phrase he uses to describe much of what he observes and experiences, including his own actions and motivations. If the material world is out of true, how much more so is the emotional landscape. The more the narrator reveals about his own mistrust of others, the more the reader mistrusts the narrator himself. McConnell renders his protagonist’s mistrust—and deftly manipulates the reader’s—in dizzyingly elliptical moments like this one in which the narrator tries to decide how far to trust Topher, the protégé of the grossly obese riverboat captain: “It did seem ludicrous to imagine scuffed, rough-around-the-edges Topher could be a preening hustler or a gold digger. But if there were any truth in it, his good humor made all his wiles forgivable—whether you wanted them to be or not.”

The moral heart of the novel resides in its other enduring theme, the nature of consciousness. The narrator makes much of his ability to achieve a low level of consciousness, a state that permits a respite from logic, analysis, and strategy, but not from purposeful action. High states of consciousness are the default position and therefore unremarkable, while low states, he insists, are where the truth resides. The protagonist can spot this deep state in others and admires them for it with a kind of envy: if only the protagonist himself could sustain such a state, he could become untroubled by the silver and the deaths it has caused. Such admiration is at the heart of the protagonist’s interest in Topher Ammidon Smith. Rather than sexual desire, which he observes at one remove, what the protagonist finds enrapturing is Topher’s ability to “descend.” With Topher at “the lowest level of existence,” the protagonist experiments with the power he has over the much younger man. “I turned him to face me. He turned as easily as the window shutters. Gently I pushed him a step or two backward. I was frowning intently, as if I were a scientist, and this was the experiment my career depended on.” What becomes clear is that this low level of existence is, for the narrator, a place of detachment from moral codes or compasses. In the book’s climactic scene, the protagonist beats a man in a ritualized encounter that forces him to face his betrayal of his fellows back in B. In the aftermath, he questions his victim about his physical injuries: “Inside or surface?” It’s an eerie echo of the many times throughout the story when he questions the state and quality of his own or someone else’s consciousness.

When the insurrection that drove the narrator out of B finally threatens A., the protagonist must again try to escape with his cargo. It turns out his low-life connections like Topher prove effective, while interventions from more powerful friends, such as the journalist Van Loon, fall short or fail to materialize. In the end, his reckoning comes not from the natives, the government, or the military, but rather from the corporation. If not for that, it would be tempting to compare the novel’s satisfying dénouement to that of Moby-Dick: one last great effort in service of his master’s obsession that leaves him alone in the water. With this final, transcendent scene, McConnell grants his narrator an ambiguous liberation that fixes him just out of true, so to speak, which is where all but the greatest truths—lie.

By Richard Canning

This is an utterly beautiful novel, simple but ambitious, knowing but never self-conscious, literary without ever proclaiming its own worth. It deserves acclaim, attention, awards and… your attention. Equally, you deserve the experience of reading this repeatedly astonishing book.

by Mark Hardy


When I initially encountered the cover of David McConnell’s second novel, The Silver Hearted, I was riveted by the image of an illuminated ship, isolated and askew in a vast river. My eyes were then drawn top center, to a tiny quote from Edmund White, “…a perfect work of art.” The ultra-fine print beckoned, challenged, “Come hither. I dare you to disagree with this American master.”

It is safe to assume Alyson Books was elated, at the very least, to have a literary icon provide this incredible blurb. No doubt, these seventeen letters will sell far more than seventeen copies.

But I wonder if the marketing department anticipated the degree to which these five small words tempted this reader (and likely others) to examine the novel in search of the reasons behind Mr. White’s superlative. It is possible they engineered it.

Only a few paragraphs in, McConnell gracefully transported me to a world so entirely engaging and captivating, there was no room for even Edmund White’s praise to shadow my transcendence. This novel’s world is concurrently historic and futuristic, familiar and foreign, gentle and gory, masculine and feminine. It is a world where women once were but now have little presence. They are remembered, but are not needed or pined for. It is a world where straight men aren’t threatened by, nor do they threaten, men who love other men.

The plot of The Silver Hearted is simple to summarize: a man is at the end of his rope. In a time of war, he must secretly and safely usher 24 blue boxes filled with 36,000 silver dollars—other men’s silver dollars, down a river.

His existence depends on his success at this task. It is a quest with obstacles, told by a most linguistic and literary narrator.

It is not the plot of the novel that grips tight and squeezes relentlessly. It could be argued that the plot is secondary.

McConnell set his novel in a fascinating and furious world. His ability to build passionate empathy for even the most minute and least likeable characters drew me in. The craft with which he rendered me thoroughly invested in situations and circumstances (ones that in less skilled hands would send me back to the bookstore) kept me reading. The luxurious language with which he told this story catapulted me into immediate fandom.

I read nonstop, suspended in time, in an imaginary city that McConnell has drawn with elaborate and vibrant specificity. While there are no factual reasons for finding this story’s settings or situations pleasing, every moment I lived in The Silver Hearted’s confines brought visual, intellectual, and emotional satisfaction.

I resented and regretted reaching McConnell’s final word. So I rebelled, and read it a second and third time—as befits any perfect work of art. I highly recommend you do likewise.

By Hassan Novoa

In a nameless port town, an impoverished heir is hired by a faction of shady investors to look after a vast sum of money. For assistance, the nameless guardian turns to a young, attractive sailor, who helps smuggle the fortune to safety as war approaches. Reminiscent of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the narrator’s sensitive, unique style of telling his amazing story makes the book incredibly exciting. One of the best gay novels in a long time, Silver Hearted is neither pretentious nor ridden with sexual overtones. Instead, the sexual ambiguity of the narrator and the dangerous sailors that surround him always keeps you guessing. The novel immerses the reader in a feeling that can best be described as a foreboding calm before the storm.

With this novel, where reality is as tangible as smoke, I kept thinking, “I wish my tenth grade English teacher were here to explain this to me.” No, it’s not so complex you’ll feel you have to wait for the Cliffs Notes, but it is a book to be read at the same time as someone else for the sake of discussing what happened and what it meant. (I very definitely recommend it for book groups) The language is beyond beautiful and the depiction of a danger-filled journey through a tropical ruin of a country is cinematically mesmerizing. This isn’t exactly a light, fun-filled read, but for those who enjoy slipstream-ish literary fiction, lush imagery and symbolism, and “odd clock” world building, this surreal voyage into chaos should not be missed.

David McConnell's thrilling adventure The Silver Hearted . . . has been variously compared to Heart of Darkness, Billy Budd, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Graham Greene, Jean Genet, Tom of Finland (from Peter Cameron), Blood Meridian, Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, and the movie Beau Travail.

[I]t is a genuine page-turner . . . Mr. McConnell is particularly skillful at conveying a sense of doom–a gloomy foreboding–throughout the novel.

If you love a good pirate novel, David McConnell's latest The Silver Hearted has all the mystery, intrigue, treasure, revolution, longing, corruption, and violence that one would expect, plus a few hot, sexy pirates thrown into the mix.